A major cell phone outage affected thousands of people in the Tri-State Tuesday. The outage mainly affected customers of AT&T and T-Mobile, and to a lesser extent, Sprint and Verizon Wireless. In a statement, an AT&T spokeswoman said service was fully restored at 9:30pm to customers who were affected by a hardware related issue. According to the Kentucky Office of Information Technology, they started receiving calls about the lack of service around 2:30pm. They said AT&T told them it was because of a fiber-optic cable accidentally cut in the western part of the state.